There’s bad news if you use LinkedIn to run polls, as the professional-focused social network is removing the ability for you to do so from next month. The company says its LinkedIn Polls in Groups feature will be retired on May 15, and all data related to polls will be removed.

Polls were introduced to groups in December 2011 as “a simple way to unlock the insights of the members of the group”, but the feature is being made obsolete as part of ongoing efforts to provide “a simple and efficient experience” to LinkedIn users, as a notice explains:

We’re continuously evaluating how our current products and features are used, and seeking new ways to focus our resources on building the best products. This sometimes results in the retirement of certain features.

This not the first time that LinkedIn has put a polling feature out to pasture. The company actually retired its general polling application — which allowed any user to create and run a poll among their followers — at the end of June last year, but it allowed polls to live on in groups… until now.

There are plenty of third-party services that can step in to fill a void, such as Wedgies — which we at The Next Web use — and Voice. The advantage of using independent tools like these is that they can be deployed inside a range of social media and embedded on websites, which gives them the potential to gain greater exposure and provide more responses.